What’s In a Chip? Reverse Engineer It to Find Out

I had an interesting meeting today at DAC with Julia Elvidge, the president of Chipworks. Chipworks basically reverse engineers chips to find out exactly what makes them tick. The results may surprise you—they certainly did me.

I must admit I’ve long associated reverse engineering with shady operators who’d rather knock off your chip than invest in the R&D to develop their own. While not denying that’s been known to happen, Julia proceeded to educate me to the legitimate uses of reverse engineering.